Jack Kilby photographs

A Guide to the Collection

Photographs by engineer Jack St. Clair Kilby. Subjects include cityscapes, landscapes, architecture, people and foreign locations. Kilby was a skilled and creative photographer; many of the images were made with a Hasselblad camera. Also included are photographic pamphlets, awards and materials related to the Dallas Camera Club and the Photographic Society of America. Kilby is best known as the inventor of the integrated circuit for which he won the Nobel Prize and for his work at Texas Instruments.

Jack St. Clair Kilby (1923-2005) was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, November 8, 1923. While he was a boy, his family moved to Great Bend, Kansas. His father, Hubert S. ("Jack") Kilby, was president of the Kansas Power Company. Young Jack’s penchant for photography and electronics began during his youth in Great Bend. Kilby was influenced by his father’s interest in photography and his career in engineering. While Kilby was in high school, instead of the Kodak snapshot camera found in most households, the family had a medium format 120 film camera and a Kodak Bantam, a small camera for the more advanced photographer.
The Kilbys had a darkroom in their home, and young Jack was in the high school camera club and served as photographer for the yearbook. His sister, Jane, remembered, "Jack enjoyed photography a great deal, but after the 1937 blizzard, he became terribly interested in ham radio…He would contact people from all over the place." The severe ice storm had taken out telephone and power lines and blocked roads in the area, so that the only way the senior Mr. Kilby could communicate across the state was through ham radio. Kilby saw this as a decisive moment in his life and mentioned it years later when he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000: "My dad’s goal was to do whatever it took to run his business and to help people, but I thought that amateur radio was a fascinating subject. It sparked my interest in electronics, and that’s when I decided that this field was something I wanted to pursue."

In 1941, Kilby enrolled in the school of engineering at the University of Illinois. He eventually worked as photographer for the yearbook there, too. American involvement in World War II interrupted his college career, however, and Kilby entered active duty in the Army in 1943. He took the Bantam camera with him to the China, Burma, India (CBI) theater where he was stationed as an enlisted radio transmitter repair man. While overseas, Kilby made black and white photographs and Kodachrome slides of the base camp, and military and civilian activities in the area. After he was discharged from the Army in December 1945, Kilby returned to the University of Illinois. There was probably little time for photography for the next few years as he finished his degree in electrical engineering, married Barbara Annegers, and joined Centralab, an electronics company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The idea of miniaturizing electronic circuits piqued Kilby’s interest at Centralab, and he wanted more time to experiment than was afforded him there. His job search led him to begin work at Texas Instruments in Dallas in the spring of 1958. While the TI employees took their "annual mass vacation" during the summer, Kilby, having just joined the company, stayed in Dallas and worked alone on his ideas for electrical circuits, making detailed notes and drawings. His demonstration of the microchip in September is now history.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Kilby made Kodachrome slides of his daughters, Ann and Janet, family trips, and other events in their lives. In 1964, he decided to take up photography in a more serious way, and he began using the best in medium format cameras, the Hasselblad 500C. Kilby printed his own black and white negatives and showed real ingenuity in composing his images, and in manipulating and cropping his prints. Extreme camera angles often gave his images an abstract pattern, sometimes like a geometric grid. Although he made color negatives too, he seldom had them enlarged, probably preferring to make darkroom modifications himself which were not possible for him with color film that required outside processing. As a photographer, the subjects he chose fall into several general categories: urban and street photography, industrial, landscape, and people as well as abstraction and experimentation.

One can speculate on the external influences that might have impacted Kilby’s photography. An avid reader, Kilby subscribed to Camera magazine in the 1960s and 1970s. Removed from mainstream photographic trends in such cities as New York or London, Kilby worked in relative isolation in Dallas, and Camera, a quality international art photography periodical, was an important resource for him. Kilby visited galleries and museums in other cities and purchased books. Over time, he developed his own personal style. Kilby exchanged ideas with other photographers at the Dallas Camera Club and also joined the Photographic Society of America (PSA). He exhibited his prints both locally with the Camera Club and nationally at the PSA photography salons.

Although he kept close ties with TI, in 1970, Kilby took a leave of absence to work as an independent inventor. During his career, Kilby applied for more than 60 patents and worked on a wide variety of designs, many of which eventually became a reality, among them, the digital watch. In 1981, Kilby’s wife, Barbara, died, and with her, it seemed, something of the light in his life was gone. By the mid-1980s Kilby was no longer active in photography. His photographic output in roughly 20 years, however, was prodigious. Creativity was a driving force in his work and in his photography. Jack Kilby died in Dallas June 20, 2005.

The Jack Kilby photograph collection consists of approximately 1,000 black and white and color photographs and 18,000 negatives and contact sheets. Also included are early glass plate negatives, 16mm film and Stereo Realist slides probably made by his father Hubert S. Kilby, 35mm color slides ca. 1943-1984 made by both father and son. There are many larger format photographs, mostly black and white and printed by Kilby in his darkroom. In addition, there are miscellaneous manuscripts related to Kilby’s photography and copies of Camera magazine and other photography publications. Series 1 consists of correspondence, photography manuals, and materials related to the Dallas Camera Club and the Photographic Society of America. Series 2 has photographic awards from the Dallas Camera Club and the PSA and Kilby’s light meter. Series three is made up of small Kodak prints (3 ½ x 3 ½-inch) and 2 ¼ x 2 ¼-inch negatives.
Series 4 has larger prints, mostly black and white, some mounted and titled exhibit prints in varying sizes. Series 5 consists of negatives, movie film and slides, and Series 6 consists of black and white negatives and contact sheets.